Adam Crozier leaving Royal Mail to take the helm of ITV looks like a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire. Both companies are technologically challenged, face structural decline and are in need of re­inventing themselves.

But Crozier and ITV could make a good match. The former head of the Football Association recently had lunch with Guardian journalists and was charm personified. The Royal Mail's problem with the unions could be solved, he soothed. It was in good shape financially and had a healthy future, he insisted. Glossing over the crisis facing Royal Mail was a typically convincing performance from the boyish Crozier.

The 46-year-old honed his presentational skills at Saatchi and Saatchi where he was head of advertising. But it was the surprise appointment to the FA in 2000 at the age of 35 that first put him in the public eye. He was tasked with shaking up the fusty organisation and making it more commercially minded, able to exploit the huge sums being poured into football by broadcasters. He replaced the FA's 91-strong board with a 12-member ruling committee, and also appointed Sven-Göran Eriksson as the first foreign manager of England.

But his modernising zeal made enemies, a theme which recurs through his career. One former FA executive told the Guardian: "He has to take credit for modernising the FA. But he was an advertising man brought in to run football and he didn't know a great deal about football. He hired this new breed of advertising and marketing people on super duper wages and left a black hole in the finances. There was a lot of clear resentment. Morale was very low."

In 2003, he joined Royal Mail, a company losing £1m a day and in no state to compete with private operators who were arriving on the scene as the postal market was liberalised. In his seven years in charge, he slashed the workforce by about 60,000 to about 150,000, mostly on a voluntary basis, and made the company profitable again. But for many workers, modernisation has become synonymous with overwork, as managers become more aggressive in pushing staff to meet ever tougher efficiency targets. There have been two waves of national strikes in protest, most recently before Christmas. Unions at Royal Mail began to lose patience with Crozier several years ago and increasingly saw him as part of the problem. One union source said: "He did not take the workforce with him."

Last year Crozier became Britain's second best-paid public sector employee, taking home almost £1m, attracting more ire during a recession which Royal Mail cited when it imposed a pay freeze on workers last year.

The government's plan to part-privatise the group, which was scrapped last year following a backbench revolt, placed Crozier in a difficult position. The plan offered the prospect of more capital to modernise the business and an agreement by the government to write off its crippling estimated £10bn pension deficit. But the Hooper report recommending privatisation, which the government endorsed, stated that private sector management expertise was needed, implying that current management was not up to the job. Nevertheless, privatisation offered him the opportunity for more radical modernisation. By the time the plan had finally been scrapped last summer, placing the future of the postal operator in limbo, he had made up his mind to leave, according to industry sources yesterday.

In an interview with the Guardian a couple of years ago, Crozier was asked what drove him to take on big organisations which needed to change. "Thrawn" was the Scottish word he used. "It means deliberately difficult. When I first started this job, people said 'you're mad'. And the more they told me that, the more I thought this was the right thing to do, which was being thrawn." At Saatchi, he says he wanted to take on the difficult client accounts. "I wanted to work on the ones that were about to fire us or we had a really terrible relationship with because actually it was more interesting," he says. "So I suppose it was at that point that I realised I actually like changing things."

There is no doubt that ITV needs serious change, and any failure will be public. It's lucky the softly spoken Scot is thrawn.